959 research outputs found
Exploring the Time Domain With Synoptic Sky Surveys
Synoptic sky surveys are becoming the largest data generators in astronomy,
and they are opening a new research frontier, that touches essentially every
field of astronomy. Opening of the time domain to a systematic exploration will
strengthen our understanding of a number of interesting known phenomena, and
may lead to the discoveries of as yet unknown ones. We describe some lessons
learned over the past decade, and offer some ideas that may guide strategic
considerations in planning and execution of the future synoptic sky surveys.Comment: Invited talk, to appear in proc. IAU SYmp. 285, "New Horizons in Time
Domain Astronomy", eds. E. Griffin et al., Cambridge Univ. Press (2012).
Latex file, 6 pages, style files include
Quasars as Probes of Late Reionization and Early Structure Formation
Observations of QSOs at z ~ 5.7 - 6.4 show the appearance of Gunn-Peterson
troughs around z ~ 6, and a change in the slope of the IGM optical depth tau(z)
near z ~ 5.5. These results are interpreted as a signature of the end of the
reionization era, which probably started at considerably higher redshifts.
However, there also appears to be a substantial cosmic variance in the
transmission of the IGM, both along some lines of sight, and among different
lines of sight, in this intriguing redshift regime. We suggest that this is
indicative of a spatially uneven reionization, possibly caused by the
bias-driven primordial clustering of the reionization sources. There is also
some independent evidence for a strong clustering of QSOs at z ~ 4 - 5 and
galaxies around them, supporting the idea of the strong biasing of the first
luminous sources at these redshifts. Larger samples of high-z QSOs are needed
in order to provide improved, statistically significant constraints for the
models of these phenomena. We expect that the Palomar-Quest (PQ) survey will
soon provide a new set of QSOs to be used as cosmological probes in this
redshift regime.Comment: To appear in proceedings of UC Irvine May 2005 workshop on "First
Light & Reionization", eds. E. Barton & A. Cooray, New Astronomy Reviews, in
pres
Topic Maps as a Virtual Observatory tool
One major component of the VO will be catalogs measuring gigabytes and
terrabytes if not more. Some mechanism like XML will be used for structuring
the information. However, such mechanisms are not good for information
retrieval on their own. For retrieval we use queries. Topic Maps that have
started becoming popular recently are excellent for segregating information
that results from a query. A Topic Map is a structured network of hyperlinks
above an information pool. Different Topic Maps can form different layers above
the same information pool and provide us with different views of it. This
facilitates in being able to ask exact questions, aiding us in looking for gold
needles in the proverbial haystack. Here we discuss the specifics of what Topic
Maps are and how they can be implemented within the VO framework.
URL: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~aam/science/topicmaps/Comment: 11 pages, 5 eps figures, to appear in SPIE Annual Meeting 2001
proceedings (Astronomical Data Analysis), uses spie.st
Some Pattern Recognition Challenges in Data-Intensive Astronomy
We review some of the recent developments and challenges posed by the data
analysis in modern digital sky surveys, which are representative of the
information-rich astronomy in the context of Virtual Observatory. Illustrative
examples include the problems of an automated star-galaxy classification in
complex and heterogeneous panoramic imaging data sets, and an automated,
iterative, dynamical classification of transient events detected in synoptic
sky surveys. These problems offer good opportunities for productive
collaborations between astronomers and applied computer scientists and
statisticians, and are representative of the kind of challenges now present in
all data-intensive fields. We discuss briefly some emergent types of scalable
scientific data analysis systems with a broad applicability.Comment: 8 pages, compressed pdf file, figures downgraded in quality in order
to match the arXiv size limi
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